Hell's Foundations Quiver (13 page)

Down on the gundeck, the big rifles recoiled, then slid smoothly back into battery under the urging of the hydropneumatic recoil system. Gunners turned the heavy breech blocks and swung them open, and the waiting swabs hissed into the breeches to extinguish any lingering embers, followed by fresh sixty-eight-pound shells and twenty-pound bags of powder.

Twenty seconds later, they fired again.

*   *   *

Not possible. That's not
possible,
damn it!

Failyx Sylvstyr stared in disbelief. Those preposterously long guns hadn't run back in at all! They'd merely surged backward several feet, then slid right back into firing position. And then, impossibly quickly, they
did
fire again. His twelve-pounders' maximum rate of fire was no more than four rounds per minute—one every fifteen seconds—even with a superbly trained crew. There was no way guns with the massive destructive power the heretics' had revealed could fire equally quickly! It simply couldn't be done!

But the heretics were doing it. Somehow, they must be loading the accursed things from the
breech
end, like their damned infantry's rifles!

Another hurricane of devastation ripped through his regiment's position, rending and shredding, setting off ready charges in a cascade of secondary explosions, and Major Sylvstyr's stomach was a frozen iron ball as he realized just how quickly that demon-spawned ironclad was going to tear his command apart.

And they weren't even scratching its paint.

Bile rose in his throat. His men were dying about him, and they were dying for
nothing
. Surely, whatever God demanded of them it wasn't to sacrifice their lives uselessly when their weapons couldn't even hope to damage the enemies who were killing them!

“
Get them out!
” he roared, staggering out of his command post and down the length of the earthwork, feeling his way through the smoke, the stench of explosions, and the shattered bodies of his men. “
Get the men
out
of here, damn it!
”

He collided with Captain Hylmyn, one of his battery commanders, in the smoke and chaos and grabbed him by both shoulders.

“Get your men out, Henrai!” he shouted, his voice frail in the tumult and the madness while he shook Hylmyn. “Get them out—and pass the word! We can't fight
that
with twelve-pounders!”

“But … but, Sir—!”

“Don't argue, damn you!” Sylvstyr snarled. “Get them out—
now!
”

Fresh thunderbolts unleashed new explosions and the screams of torn and broken men tore at their ears. Hylmyn stared at him for a single heartbeat longer, then jerked a choppy nod and spun away, shouting orders of his own.

Sylvstyr left him to it, fighting his way down the length of the earthwork through the confusion and the dying, bellowing the order to retreat again and again. Some of his men heard him and refused to obey. Others would never hear anything again, but most of his gunners—those who were still alive, anyway—heard and obeyed.

The major felt the shame of running away. He knew—he
knew
—it was the right order to give, but still he felt the shame. And he knew his men would, as well. He didn't know what the inquisitors might say about this day's work, but General Rychtyr would understand. He'd know there'd been no choice but to—

Another six-inch shell stabbed into the ruins of Failyx Sylvstyr's regiment. This one found a magazine, and the major felt himself flying through the air. Then he felt a shattering impact … and nothing else at all.

*   *   *

“Secure the guns, Master Blahdysnberg,” Halcom Bahrns said, and his voice was flat, his eyes dark. “Tell the crews I said well done.”

“Aye, aye, Sir!” Pawal Blahdysnberg's jubilant voice came back up the voice pipe. “Thank you!”

“You're welcome,” Bahrns replied. “You deserve it.”

He closed the voice pipe, undogged the conning tower door, and stepped back out onto the bridge wing. The long, brown fog bank of
Delthak
's gunsmoke rolled away on the chill, strengthening breeze. More smoke rose in a thick, choking plume above the plowed wreckage which had once been a battery of twenty-four twelve-pounders. There might be as many as five intact guns buried in those ruins, he thought grimly. There couldn't be more of them.

I wonder how Pawal will feel about those compliments of mine when he has time to come above decks and really
see
what we've done? I know Baron Green Valley's right. You don't win a war by dying for your cause; you win it by making the other poor damned bastard die for
his.
And Langhorne knows the perfect battle from any CO's viewpoint is one in which none of
his
people die. But
this—!
It was like … like clubbing baby chicks. They couldn't possibly hurt us, and we
.…

He stared at his ship's handiwork, listening as the thunder of the army's artillery rolled and bellowed, and then he drew a deep breath and turned back to the conning tower.

“Come a quarter point to larboard and increase to half ahead,” he said quietly.

“Quarter point to larboard and half ahead, aye, Sir!” PO Fyrgyrsyn responded, and if there was any doubt in his voice, Bahrns couldn't hear it. At the moment, that mattered. It mattered a lot, because
Fyrgyrsyn
mattered.

Captain Halcom Bahrns squared his shoulders and raised his double-glass again as he looked for the tow road along the top of the western riverbank. The one he was supposed to take under fire to deny it to the enemy and cover the landing of the Marine battalion Earl Hanth was sending upriver in
Delthak
's wake. It was unlikely they'd be able to cut off Rychtyr's retreat entirely. The Dohlaran general had been too smart to dig in on the eastern side of the river. He'd probably believed—hoped, at least—that his barricade of river barges would protect his rear, but it was obvious he hadn't been prepared to risk his army's existence on that belief. And their spies reported another barricade across the river five miles farther north. However willing the engineers might be, they wouldn't be able to blow a gap through that obstacle before most of the fleeing Dohlarans were already past it on their way to Evyrtyn. So, no, they weren't going to keep Rychtyr from falling back up the line of the Seridahn, but they could damned well make it a costly process.

And that, he reminded himself, glancing back at the shattered defensive battery, was what fighting a war was all about, wasn't it?

 

.VII.

Fifty Miles East of Malys, The South March Lands, Republic of Siddarmark

“We're down eighteen more draft horses, Sir,” Colonel Ahlfryd Makyntyr said wearily. “And another twelve-pounder broke an axle this afternoon, too. I think I can spread the remaining horses to keep the other pieces moving—for a while, at least—but I've lost two more dragons, as well.”

Sir Rainos Ahlverez' expression was grim as he listened to his senior artillerist's report. Makyntyr wasn't telling him anything he hadn't expected. Or anything he hadn't already heard entirely too many times during the nightmare retreat from the Kyplyngyr Forest debacle. The general commanding what was left of an army which had once counted almost a quarter million men shouldn't have been worrying his head over the loss of a single twelve-pounder, but he no longer had almost a quarter million men. By the best estimate available to him, he was down to under forty thousand, including over ten thousand Desnairians.

And, allowing for Makyntyr's most recent loss, nineteen pieces of artillery.

“Do what you can, Ahlfryd,” he said. There'd been a time when his relationship with Makyntyr had been icily formal, but that time was long past. One thing about unmitigated disasters, he thought mordantly; they put pettier concerns and conflicts into perspective. “Go ahead and pull your remaining dragons off the ammunition carts. The guns are more important than they are, and we'll settle for the ammunition on the limbers. Once you've got the traction you need for all of them, turn the other dragons over to Shulmyn and lay fuses to the carts.” He quirked a bitter smile. “No point leaving all that powder lying around for the heretics.”

“Yes, Sir.”

Makyntyr's unhappiness was apparent, but he didn't even try to argue. No artillerist liked to be told his reserve ammunition had become irrelevant. There was no point pretending it hadn't, however, and Sir Shulmyn Rahdgyrz' remaining supply wagons were vastly more important to the beaten army shambling its way towards what it hoped might someday be safety and survival.

A hunger-gaunt horse trotted up beside Ahlverez, and the captain in its saddle touched his chest in salute to his superiors.

“A courier just came in from Colonel Ohkarlyn, Sir,” Sir Lynkyn Lattymyr said. “The Colonel's reached Malys. He says it's deserted, but he's pushing a section out towards Kostyr and one of his companies has established a blocking position on the road to Thyssyk.”

“Any word from Colonel Tyrwait?”

“Not since this morning, Sir.”

Ahlverez grunted in acknowledgment and unfolded his wretched excuse for a map, wishing for no more than the ten thousandth time that he had a better one. For that matter, that he had
any
maps of this Archangels-forsaken stretch of the South March. The best he had was this rough sketch, with an unreliable scale and so-called details in which he dared not place much trust. Worse, he had to assume any heretics hunting his command to finish off what was left of it had much better ones than he did.

What he did know was that the miserable, narrow, muddy tracks connecting the tiny hamlets thinly scattered across the almost three hundred straight-line miles between the village of Sygmar south of the Kyplyngyr and the larger town of Malyktyn on the high road between Roymark and Cheryk were the closest thing to a road net the Army of Shiloh's remnants had. The only hope that any of Ahlverez' men might ever see home lay on the far side of Malyktyn, and they had precious little chance of getting there.

The farm tracks had never been intended for the traffic required to support even a routed army, especially in winter. They existed primarily to haul crops to market after harvest, when the weather was dry and the dirt roads offered firm going for farmers' wagons. In winter, soaked by the all too frequent rains and plagued by nights when the temperature dropped below freezing, the going had been anything but firm even before hundreds of thousands of feet and hooves churned it into muck. Even as their strength steadily diminished, the half-starved draft animals had to work twice as hard to haul wagons and guns over that treacherous surface, and men who were themselves half starved struggled to place each weary foot in front of another in mud which was often knee-deep.

Sir Rainos Ahlverez was a nobleman, accustomed to looking down his aristocratic nose at the commoners who provided the Royal Dohlaran Army's enlisted soldiers, yet every one of his surviving men—even the wretched Desnairians who'd attached themselves to his command—had become precious to him. Not simply because they represented the dwindling fighting power (such as it was) under his command, either. No. He knew what these men had done, what they'd suffered and given for God and king, how many others had lost their lives already. It was his responsibility to get them home again; he
owed
them that for the price they'd paid. And it was a responsibility he knew he was unlikely to meet.

But it wouldn't be because he hadn't tried, he reminded himself, inhaling deeply. He was just as happy none of the Army of Shiloh's senior Desnairian officers had made it this far. While it would have been intensely satisfying to be able to shoot them out of hand, he had at least a chance to get
some
of their men home without them to hinder him.

He frowned down at the dogeared sketch map. Malys lay southwest of the Kyplyngyr, at the intersection of no less than five of the pitiful, muddy excuses for roads available to him. The fact that Ohkarlyn, commanding one of his last two semi-full-strength cavalry regiments, had secured the road junction was good news. But to offset that, he'd still heard nothing from Tyrwait, who commanded the other one of those regiments. Tyrwait was doing his best to screen the main column's western flank, and he was supposed to be scouting towards the village of Zhonstyn, eighty miles south-southwest of Malys. Hopefully, he was also finding a place for at least a temporary blocking position on the farm road that led from Malys, through Zhonstyn, to Thesmar, although Ahlverez hoped to Langhorne it wouldn't be required. If it was.…

His position at the moment was over three hundred miles as a wyvern flew from Thesmar, at the mouth of the Seridahn River. Given everything else that had happened, he was certain the heretic Hanth had been heavily reinforced since Duke Harless' bloody failure to storm Thesmar's entrenchments at the very beginning of the Fort Tairys campaign.

It was obvious the Army of Shiloh had been not simply outfought but out-
thought
. It had been sucked into doing
exactly
what the heretics wanted. There was no point pretending otherwise, and the heretics who'd baited the trap would scarcely have overlooked the potential threat Thesmar represented to that army's rear. And as Makyntyr had quietly pointed out to him, the Charisian Navy could easily have landed another ten or twenty thousand men in Thesmar Bay.

Ahlverez still couldn't figure out how the heretics had managed it so smoothly, but it had become painfully evident that Bryahn Kyrbysh had died in the same massacre as the rest of the Fort Tairys garrison. All his dispatches detailing the starvation and demoralization of the heretic Eastshare's understrength army had clearly come from someone else, and Ahlverez felt his teeth grinding once more as he visualized the grinning heretic duke dictating those lying messages.